Radegast Station Monument to the Lodz/Litzmannstadt Ghetto and it's Jewish victims.

Radegast Station building has remained till today. There is also an original railway track  with the name of  Krupp factory running next to the station. In the ’90  Monumentum Iudaicum Lodzense Foundation and the Jewish Community took on efforts to change the station into National Remembrance Place. Within one year  38 000 Jews and 5 000 Austrian Gypsies were transported to  Łódź through the Radegast Station. There didn’t stay in the city for long, as in 1942 the Germans deported to extermintaion camps about 150 000 people. Almost all of them ended up in gas chambers. The last transportation took place on 29th August 1944, and the train finished its jpurney in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It also meant the end of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. There were a few people left to tidy the deserted district. Only 5 % out of 230 000 Jews living in Łódź before the war, survived.

The monument

The discovery, that the wooden building with Krupp railway track was the Litzmannstadt Ghetto’s transportation station, was immediately followed by the idea of making it the monument commemorating  all those who passed through the ghetto. The monument was designed by Czesław Bielecki. The railway station, separated from the modern buildings with a brick wall which gives an impression of solitude and reflection of the tragedy that happened there. The place is designed to let visitors identify with those who were transported to the extermination camps. From the train depot, visitors walk through the 140 meter Tunnel of the Deported which symbolises inevitable fate of deported Jews. Its walls hold transport lists showing enormous numbers of those sent to death.

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